It turns out that there is a film in which a blurry shadow on a black background hisses at a blurry shadow on a black background which clicks and purrs. Also, briefly, some rednecks get nuked. This film is easy to sleep through, because of the smooth, narcotic consistency of both the sound (with the hissing and the purring) and the visuals (black). I think this film was called Alien v Predator Requiem.

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I have a pretty decently calibrated home theater. When I tried to watch the film I assumed someone had messed with my controls because it was so dark. But raising the black-level only makes the visuals gray; there is absolutely no picture information.

Contrast that to Quantum of Solace which is 100 minutes of shaky, close zoomed "action" and noise with no obvious plot - not that it matters, the camera operator seems to have had his camera stuck in EXTREME CLOSEUP! all the time and overused the "blur" filter.

So maybe if we mix the two films, we'll come out with something watchable.

I had that same problem with the fight scenes in Blade II. That and when they'd throw out some inane wrestling moves. I like Guillermo del Toro's work normally (Chronos was great and Mimic I hope was terrible mainly because the Weinsteins were involved), but the fight scenes were all blurry close-ups.

Besides the fimmakers' seeming lack of ability to choose the correct f-stop, this movie also annoyed me because it's the first Alien or Predator movie where I really, really intensely hated every single human character. About five minutes in I started saying, "Will you PLEASE kill these sorry fuckers already!" And near the end of the movie where they spend some time focusing on the survivors trying to escape, I resented every second of time they were on-screen.

It's a shame they never went with the interesting earlier script ideas for this series that were set in the future and involved human space marines and such rather than giving us these completely pointless pseudo-horror movies where the Alien and Predator are basically just monsters killing random idiots on Earth.

I mean, don't we want to see Predator society and have a real plot rather than just another movie where people run away from something?

Well, I think it's Space Marines because they're serving on ships primarily and are often used as expeditionary forces.

From what I recall reading back in the mid-90s or so when AvP was stuck in development hell an early script called for the Predators and Marines to join forces to fight the Aliens partly due to a bond forming between Predator Elder Broken Tusk and a human Marine. All of this occurring after humans were stuck between the two sides.

Actually, I think it was mainly just the story of the first comic. Did the people making this damn thing even read that or did they and decide that their unimaginably lame idea would somehow be better than something cool that actually takes place in the rest of the established universe? I mean, why are they dicking around on Earth?

In all fairness I never actually read the comic series. I just read it in some article a long time ago and then to double-check some details I found that Wikipedia filled in almost all the gaps and the vague plot outline I knew about was basically the same as the comic.

Indeed, they violated the core principle of the first four movies, even the bad ones: if the aliens make it to Earth, Earth is fucked. Game over, man. Nuke the site, etc.

I can only think that they looked at Alien: Resurrection and Alien 3 and decided "well, that was shit and it did poorly at the box office, time to mix things up a bit and realign for the wide audience".

The real A or P fans fled the franchise ages ago. I doubt the makers gave two shits about the comics or any existing storylines. These are being pumped out as part of the same business process that produces the endless Jason vs. Freddy in space / underwater movies.